Windows 7 is growing and people are digging their iPhone – if you believe these charts

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Key takeaways of zdnet

• This week dozens of sites reported that the use of Windows 7 is “touching the sky.”
• The reports are based on the chart from a notorious incredible source.
• More likely clarification: Changes in iOS 26 are confusing analytics trackers.

This week my news feed was completely overwhelmed, which was told that the market share of Windows 7 “sky touch” last month, as users did not just say Windows 11.

Then I realized that this is the first of the month and Absolutely All those stories are visible because Global data Just released its “market share” report for the previous month. Tech reporters cannot oppose such chart Mr. Buglesworth Can not say for a bag of fresh catnip.

Wow! If you believe those numbers, in September 2025, Windows PC came from PC that came from PC, which runs about 10% of all the Windows 7 of all the traffic worldwide, an operating system that is unable and obsolete for six years.

seriously?

Also: Microsoft has lost its way

Ok, as I said, “If you believe those numbers …” If you do not have any important thinking skills, you will definitely write it. obviously Tens and perhaps millions of people have scored on the Internet, a bootlag copy of the 16 -year -old operating system has been found, and installed on its PC. And then you will make a story about why this happened.

Of course, none of it happened. Those numbers are completely nonsense. The measurements of staticcounter are infamous and incredible. They bounce around in strange ways that are truly out of understanding, and they do not prove anything about any kind of “market share”, as I have written more often than remembering. If you need a refresher, read this post.

But what about the rest of the story?

Anyway, in their haste to report these incredible numbers, those technical journalists also recalled all a big story.

This is the same in the Statecover chart of this month. Just go up Operating system market shares stake worldwide The chart for 2025, as I did here.

In May 2025, the gap between Windows PC (Blue Line) was about 7%between traffic and equipment running iOS (gray line). Since then, in five months, according to the same stack of the stateCounter GS data, which depended on all the other stories, Windows has become more popular than madness, and a large number of people have left their iPhones.

Also: My favorite iOS 26 feature makes the screenshot even more useful – and it is easy to enable it.

According to statistics from Statcounter, iOS has lost about 20% of its “market share” since the beginning of the year, going from 18.11% to 14.5% in September in January. The difference between Windows PC and iOS devices is now 16%.

This is a 9% change in a case of months, which is close to the inexplicable explosion of popularity in Windows 7 – and is unlikely unlikely.

So, what happened here?

This is not just a stateconcourse problem.

When I went to the US government website Digital analytics programWhich travels on the websites run by the federal government, I have a strange increase in popularity in the last few months with Windows (and Windows 7) got a similar pattern of data from-Vindows devices from the devices around 32.7%, but the number has been shot up to 38.1% in the month of September.

This shows that whatever is causing these strange measurements, to do something on how those trips are being recorded in the web analytics log. The most possible answer is very clear if you think about it for a minute.

Also: Can’t upgrade your Windows 10 PC? You have 2 weeks to work – and 5 options

Through the month of May, all those lines were flat and stable. Then, something happened: iOS 26 – who, not by coincidence, is seriously messed up with numbers (going from 18 to 26 in a jump) and added new privacy protection, which, among other things, freeze the user agent string in safari.

Developer Beta of iOS 26 and Macos 26 was released on 9 June 2025, the same day as WWDC. Public beta arrived on July 24, 2025. Released candidates showed in early September, and the final public release of iOS 26 and Macos 26 was on 15 September 2025.

Map those numbers on the above chart and you can see the alleged drop in use for iOS as the population of iOS 26 is gradually spread, starts in June and growing up in a stable clip in August and September. Exactly you would expect if the traffic was being accidentally counted from the devices, as if it was coming from the PC, running an ancient version of Windows.

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There are probably other factors at work here, but you do not need to be the most potential criminals to find sharalak homes.

Can we all agree that these charts are useless and the underlying data is waste?

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.